'I just couldn't put the lap together' - Raikkonen

Kimi Raikkonen says one small 'slip' on his crucial flying lap was the difference between making it into Q3 and qualifying 12th on the grid for tomorrow's German Grand Prix.

Despite a water cooling issue on Friday and a fuel pump problem during FP3 Raikkonen's pace over the three practice sessions suggested he may well have turned a corner after a disappointing first half to the year. But, after bolting on his second set of super-soft tyres in qualifying, Raikkonen seemed to make a small error through Turn 2, which he says was enough to relegate him out of Q2.

"I had a second set [of tyres] and for some reason I lost the rear in corner two, lost a lot of time and it was difficult to gain back the time after that," Raikkonen said. "I almost gained it back but I lost something in the last sector so I just couldn't put the lap together, but the car felt pretty ok until that point.

"Yesterday morning, problem, this morning, problem, that doesn't help but the car has been feeling pretty good yesterday and this morning so it's an unfortunate thing, but that's what happens."

Once again Alonso outqualified Raikkonen, the Spaniard finishing just one tenth off Sebastian Vettel in seventh.

When asked if there was a pattern to why Alonso has been consistently outperforming him, Raikkonen said: "No, just different things. I mean the racing hasn't been good either, just things going wrong all the time, making mistakes, one here, one there. I haven't been able to put a proper lap together for a long time. It's been feeling much better here, like it should, but it's still not exactly what we want.

"It feels good on on one run then on the next run, like the last qualifying, suddenly you lose the rear for not really any reason and not trying anything stupid. It's so much on the edge that it's hard to predict what the car will do and one slip, like on corner two, you lose all the speed on the straight and then it's a done deal after that. It's just the very small details but when those happen on moments like that it makes a big difference."

Raikkonen also uses Brembo brakes like Lewis Hamilton, who suffered a failure in Q1, but the Finn is not worried about a suffering a similar fate on Ferrari.

"No, not really I think those thigns have happened to me in the past, for whatever reason one disc can have some failure, I don't know what happened to them. If you take one out of 100 or 200 discs there might be some odd issues, it can happen, but we don't expect it to."

The QRU need only make some smart decisions and get rid of the deadwood to ensure the Reds are potent again on the field, and, when that happens, the overall health of Australian rugby will improve dramatically, Greg Growden writes